The Pursuit of Wealth

The fifth day of the Lunar New Year festival is purportedly the birthday of the god of Wealth.  The preceding four days are all focused on family and ancestors.  Day number five is all about taking care of number one.  Everyone could use a little more coin in the pocket.  So the fifth day sees people heading for the temples to offer their prayers and respect to the Wealth god.

Based on what I've heard from younger Chinese, I get the impression that the old beliefs are not as strong as they once were.  A key theme of the revolution was to break with old beliefs and old behaviors that had led the country to weakness in the 1800s and 1900s.  Several younger people have told me that they don't believe in anything spiritual, but rather they believe only in themselves.  They still respect and observe many of the old traditions involving family and ancestors.  But they tend to draw the line at anything with the slightest hint of organized religion.

But that said, there are still a lot of people who overtly believe.  And in a country of 1.3 billion, even a small percentage of believers means that a lot of people are going to the temple to make offerings to the god of wealth.  I also suspect there are a lot of covert believers....people who outwardly claim no religious beliefs but still make an offering now and again to hedge their bets.  And underlying it all is culture which for 5000 years has interwoven politics, language, art, and religion.  People do things because that's how they are done - never recognizing the spiritual origins.  (Kind of like saying "good-bye" in English without thinking that it started as "God be with ye")

People also do things to appease their parents.  Someone told me that he keeps a 100RMB note under the welcome mat at their front door.  This is based on the principles of Feng Shui, which say that the money at the door will invite fortune into the house.  "Really", I said, "you follow Feng Shui?"  "No", he answered, "but my mother-in-law does and I will do anything to avoid arguing with my mother-in-law."

Feng Shui, by the way, is still a big deal in these parts.  People follow the principles when building and decorating.  They claim that Feng Shui, though ancient, is based on sound scientific principles.  And I suppose the more basic rules, like orienting the entrance of your house to the South, make good sense.  But there are many elements of Feng Shui, like the money under the doormat, that are a bit more of a stretch.  These less-scientific practices live on.   If a shop is not making the profits expected, then the owners will often hire a Feng Shui expert to apply the more esoteric principles to remedy the situation.  I guess it never hurts to try.

As might guess from the five photos above, the god of Wealth LOVES combustion.  The overtures to the god started at midnight with exploding fireworks that went on for pretty much the entire 24 hours.  When daylight came, people thronged to the temples to burn incense and candles.  A lot of them.  And the bigger the combustible item, the better.  Also, people buy stacks of silver and gold foiled papers and burn them, one at a time, by the hundreds.  (That is what is shown in the fourth photo.)  I've never seen this done on any other visit to a temple.  I suspect that it is intended to mimic the burning of money.  But I'm not sure.

Inside the temple there were non-smoke-producing rituals.  One involved rubbing the head of the Chinese unicorn for good luck.  Another, shown below,  involved crossing a bridge to leave one's old fortunes behind and to cross over into the better fortunes of the new year.

At the start of the bridge was the statue of a crane, symbolic of long life.  Part of the ritual was to insert a coin into the beak of the crane before crossing over.  It is considered rude, I guess, to knock out the coins placed there by those who passed before.  So the trick was to balance your coin on top of those that got their first.  As the photo below shows, this turned into something like a game of reverse Jenga.  Thankfully, one of the monks would come by from time to time to clean out the crane's bill.

The photo below shows another tradition involving coins.  The people standing around the incense pot are trying to throw coins into the openings.  (We saw similar coin tossing in Japan, at the Golden Temple.)

The fifth day was, for the most part, the end of the formal New Year celebrations.  At least for us.  The traditional holidays do not end until after the fifteenth day - the day of the lanterns.   But the legal holidays of the golden week were over.  The god of Wealth day was a Friday.  We had to go to work on Sunday in trade for the day off.  With Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, people gradually began to filter back into town from their travels.  The roads became crowded again and the buses became full.

There is one last story of New Year to share.  It is tradition, we learned, for business to set of fireworks when they open their doors for the first time in the new year.  So on Sunday morning the fireworks started going off again with a vengeance.  On my way to work I saw bankers in suit and tie laying out huge rolls of firecrackers.  First at 8:00 am, and then at 9:00 am, the explosions reached a crescendo that sounded like the D-Day invasions.  On Monday, it all repeated again.  By Tuesday, things were back to normal and the only reminder of the holidays was the high level of particulate air pollution.